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Number is the within of all things. – Pythagoras |
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FOUNDATIONSThe problem of “what is a number,” is an old one. To tackle it, mathematicians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
A set is any well-defined collection of objects. In other words, any collection considered as a single thing. By “well-defined,” we mean that we can always tell when something is an element of the set in question, or when it isn't – no ambiguity. By “object” we mean absolutely anything: physical objects, ideas, colors, abstractions, and anything else you care to think of (that can form part of a well-defined collection).We want to be able to write our sets down, and there is an established way of doing this. We first designate a symbol to stand for the set itself, usually a capital letter like A or S or some such. Then, we use (curly) braces to enclose some representation of the elements of the set, as follows: How do we represent the elements inside the braces? There are two ways. The first and best is simply to list them. For example, if A is a set of colors, we could write it down this way: Sometimes, however, listing the elements is not convenient or even possible. In that case we would use a rule method, using a statement like “all shades of green,” or even, “all colors” to represent our set. When something is an element of a set, we denote this with a special symbol (that looks kind of like a curvaceous “E”): This means, “‘blue’ is an element of the set A.” Much of the power of set theory arises from the fact that we can form sets whose elements are other sets. For example, if A, B, and C are sets of colors, we could form a set of sets of colors. Notice that the sets A, B, and C have some elements in common. For instance, A and B both contain the element “blue.” If it happens that every element of a set is also contained in some other set, then we say that the first set is a subset of the other set, and we denote this with a big “U-shape” lying on its side. For instance, if D is the set containing only “blue,” then we could write, or, equivalently, We consider every set to be a subset of itself. (Funny thing to do, really, but it makes sense, sort of. At least, it matches the definition of subset.) Also, there is one set that is a subset of every set, namely the empty set – the set with no elements. This is often denoted by a circle with a line through it, or a pair of braces with nothing between them. Finally, we are ready for the “set operations” of union and intersection. The union of two sets A and B is the set containing all the elements that are in either A or B. Thus, if A and B are the two sets of colors above, then we have, The intersection of two sets is the set containing only elements that are in both. For example, the intersection of A and C would be denoted as follows: Armed with these ideas, we may now turn to our real purpose – nailing down numbers. NATURAL NUMBERSA number is an element of a set. Thus, the counting numbers – one, two, seventy-three, a million, and so on – are elements of the set of natural numbers.The set of natural numbers has some properties that should be noted. First, of course, is that this set is ordered. This means that, given two different natural numbers, one always comes “after” the other, and the other comes “before.” (This isn't true, for example, of the set of colors. One color doesn't “come after” another in any necessary sense.) This may seem so obvious as to be beneath our notice, but we will find as we start to really learn mathematics (as opposed to just memorizing procedures) that such niceties can sometimes take on surprising significance. In fact we can do better with the natural numbers than saying merely that they are ordered. They have a property that we call being well-ordered:
A set is said to be well-ordered if This business of not having a largest element is something every child notices at some point (and then experiences her or his first brush with the idea of infinity). We know that there isn't a largest natural number because, intuitively at least, we know the following principle (which is sometimes called the Archimedian principle): If n is a natural number, then n + 1 is a natural number. Another way of saying this is that the natural numbers are closed under addition. That is, take any two natural numbers and add them, and you get another natural number.
The natural numbers are the only numbers we need for one of the most imporant results in classical mathematics, which comes down to us from antiquity (it is found in Euclid's Elements). This result is called the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which every numerate person should know. Students often ask why zero isn't included in the set of natural numbers. Many texts describe a set called the whole numbers, which is just like the set of natural numbers except that it also includes zero. This set, however, is not used much, and it is as well to separate zero conceptually from the natural numbers because it is really a very different kind of thing. When you count a collection of objects, you don't begin by saying, “zero, one, two, ... ”, after all. Its historical development is quite different, too. People were counting for millenia before zero was ever thought of. (In fact its first use is thought to have been in India in the 6th or 7th century, and came to us – like so much of the mathematics that we use in the western world – by way of Arabic culture in about the 11th century. It's notable that native Americans, specifically the Mayan civilization, also developed a concept of zero independently of the old world.) So anyway, we don't include zero in the natural numbers. We will find it, however, in our next set... INTEGERSRATIONAL NUMBERS
Historically, the rational numbers are nearly as old as the natural numbers. They go all the way back to the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, and the Greeks were particularly fond of them (though none of these cultures used our notation, which is Arabic). The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece even believed that everything in creation could be understood and analyzed in terms of natural numbers and their ratios. (As we'll see below, this idea wasn't to last – it's days, so to speak, were numbered!) Notice that the natural numbers and the integers are both subsets of the rational numbers, since any integer can be expressed as a ratio: The rational numbers are closed under all the arithmetic operations, and if all we ever needed to do was arithmetic we'd never need any other numbers at all. However, sometimes we need more than arithmetic to construct adequate models of the world around us. For this reason, much of the work we do in mathematics will require us to add to the rational numbers a new set – a set of numbers which is the topic of our next section. IRRATIONAL NUMBERSSO . . . is the square root of two a rational number? That is, can it be written as the ratio of two integers? Remember that the Pythagoreans believed that everything was either a whole number or a ratio. In fact, it turns out that the square root of two cannot be written as a ratio of integers – it is irrational. (How do we know?) Note that “irrational” doesn't mean crazy or unreasonable; it means “not expressible as a ratio (of integers).” Legend has it that when the Pythagoreans (who were at sea at the time) first heard about it, they were so overcome by their feelings that they took the poor man who discovered this fact and threw him overboard, drowning him. The upshot is that we need more than just rational numbers if we wish to work with many kinds of abstract quantities, such as length and proportion in idealized space, for instance. We need irrational numbers too. We don't tend to bother much about the set of irrational numbers (usually denoted by a bold-faced I ) in and of itself, but focus instead on what we get when we mix the rationals and the irrationals together: that most beautiful, strange, and wondrous of sets, the real numbers. REAL NUMBERSNotationally, we often represent real numbers using decimal notation, in which we write a real number as its integer and non-integer parts, separated by a dot. Notice that the non-integer part is actually a sum of fractions: so many tenths, plus so many hundredths, plus so many thousandths, and so on. If the decimal terminates, then it represents a rational number. This is also true if the decimal repeats the same pattern endlessly. In this latter case, we represent the “endlessly repeating pattern” by putting a line over the repeating part. However, if the decimal continues forever without falling into a pattern that repeats endlessly, then it represents an irrational number. Obviously, one cannot write down an endless sequence of digits, so we just use an ellipsis after a few digits to represent that the sequence continues. Notice how unimaginably dense the set of real numbers is! We already knew that the rational numbers were dense, in that between any two you could find another, but now consider the irrationals – are they dense, or what? Just as we can find a rational number between any two rational numbers, so we can find as many irrational numbers as we please between any two rational numbers (or irrational numbers). To see this, take two rational numbers (in decimal representation) that are very close together. Then we can do the following: Infinities within infinities . . . . The real numbers have many properties that are both useful and surprising, as you will discover in your continued study. Indeed, an immense body of mathematical science is devoted to these properties, particularly the field of real analysis. There are other numbers sets, as well; the imaginary numbers, the complex numbers, the infinitessimals, and so on. There are even numbers called “hyperreal” and “surreal.” Indeed, this article merely scratches the surface of “number.” Even the natural numbers themselves, the ones we learn to count with as toddlers, harbor within their depths great riches. It is not for nothing that the great mathematician Karl Gauss called number theory (the science of the natural numbers) the “Queen of Mathematics.” A good place to start is with the suggested readings below. Numbers are the highest degree of |
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Pi In The Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being | ||
Combining an engrossing history of the concept of number with a fascinating
overview of the principal debates and debaters in the philosophy of mathematics,
Barrow leads one to the very heart of the modern crisis in mathematical thought.
Platonists and non-Platonists alike will be enthralled. “The Sussex astronomer has done it again – i.e., wrought a brilliant summation of ideas about mathematics that shows a depth of scholarship and an analysis that will leave the reader more than a little shaken.” |
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Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality |
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A beautiful exploration of how mathematics connects us with the world of experience and thought. Includes a long, engrossing section on the geometrical and other properties of the integers. | |||
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